A call about a possible weapon at a middle school prompted police to put armed officers on rooftops, close nearby streets and lock down the school. All over a giant burrito.(Perhaps I should have said "A story from the unusual world of Jr. High.")
We also have a responsibility to improve Social Security by directing extra help to those most in need and by making it a better deal for younger workers. ...
First, millions of Americans depend on Social Security checks as a primary source of retirement income, so we must keep this promise to future retirees as well. As a matter of fairness, I propose that future generations receive benefits equal to or greater than the benefits today's seniors get.
Secondly, I believe a reformed system should protect those who depend on Social Security the most. So I propose a Social Security system in the future where benefits for low-income workers will grow faster than benefits for people who are better off.Does this mean a future in which benefits for low-income workers will eventually exceed benefits for middle- and high-income workers? Or is this a proposal for flattening Social Security into a single amount paid regardless of income? If it is the former, it's a phase-out. Once you reach a certain tipping point, the working masses will object to paying a special tax for a program that no longer benefits them.
Third, any reform of Social Security must replace the empty promises being made to younger workers with real assets, real money.Whatever I am to make of Bush's insistence that he is a liar, out to defraud the working masses, treasury notes are "real assets".
I believe the best way to achieve this goal is to give younger workers the option - the opportunity - if they so choose, of putting a portion of their payroll taxes into a voluntary personal retirement account.Younger workers can already put money into IRA's, or similar retirement investment vehicles. Heck - they can even invest in treasury notes, despite Bush's insistence that those notes are fake assets, fake money.
Because this money is saved and invested, younger workers would have the opportunity to receive a higher rate of return on their money than the current Social Security system can provide.... And, of course, to receive a lower rate of return.
I know some Americans have reservations about investing in the stock market, so I propose that one investment option consist entirely of treasury bonds, which are backed by the full faith and credit of the United States government.So the Social Security Trust Fund is a fiction, becasuse it is composed of treasury notes which aren't real assets or real money - and "there is no trust". So why would the same investment vehicle be "backed by the full faith and credit of the United States government" when in a "private account" as opposed to the Social Security trust fund?
Options like this will make voluntary personal retirement accounts a safer investment that will allow an American to build a nest egg that he or she can pass on to whomever he or she chooses.Every time the Bush Administration has been pressed for specifics on private accounts, they have suggested that, upon retirement, people will be forced to purchase annuities with the balance in their accounts. There is absolutely no indication that these annuities will be payable to an heir in the event that they are not wholly depleted before a retiree dies. It is long past time when Bush provided absolute specifics about his plan, such that his promises that the accounts may be left to one's heirs are not being repeatedly and consistently contradicted by everybody else in the Administration.
For those of you lawyers and firms with websites, though, I’m going to make a broad, sweeping generalization – they stink. I know you’d like to think I’m talking about everybody’s site except yours, but I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that yours does, too.For the most part, I agree with the article. I am indifferent to some of the points - I don't think it's a big deal, for example, if a firm posts attorney pictures in B&W and have seen it done well and tastefully on a number of sites (with tasteless garish pictures on some sites that prefer color). I do, however, take issue with a couple of the author's assertions.
How often should your content change? At least once a week. And by that I mean that everything on your home page should be brand new at least once a week. So you can do a whole turn-and-burn every Monday, or you can rotate out 1/5th of your stuff every weekday. Is that a lot of work? Sure. But nobody said being relevant and attracting clients to your firm would be easy. Your alternative is to keep being boring and stuffy. It’s entirely your call.A law firm should strive to continuously add new content to a site, but it's a bit much to insist that the whole site should change on a weekly basis. Part of the calculus should be why you expect clients to come to your site. If you are expecting the same group of clients and potential clients to come, over and over again, change can be very good. If you are anticipating that your firm's site will primarily be recruiting new clients who haven't seen the site before, "change for the sake of change" can be unduly burdensome, and if it also involves reorganizing your site or changing the content of pages key to your search engine traffic, it can harm your search engine ranking. A static, encyclopedic site can do a lot more to generate business (and, should you choose, other forms of revenue) than an ever-changing site. (And I've seen quite a few high-content, frequelty updated sites suddenly become neglected, as the sponsoring lawyer or firm realizes that it isn't generating clients or is simply taking too much time to maintain.)
So you need to put as much interactivity into your site as possible. Studies have shown that websites with games are the most “sticky” of any on the Internet. And while I don’t suggest that you put a Vegas-style gambling panel on every page of your firm’s site, I do suggest that you think about your site as a chance for interaction, rather than just a table to lay brochures on.Certainly, some of the author's suggested interactivity, such as online calculators or (secure) intake forms, can be helpful to a firm's client recruitment and practice. Again, though, it is important to consider the type of client you are targeting with the site when deciding which forms of interactivity are likely to work for you. If you don't have a lot of time to devote to your site, but have a lot of clients who are interested in results that might be determinable through an online calculator or similar automatic feature, such a feature can be a good addition - in fact, if it is appealing to potential clients, given that the time investment is in creation and not maintenance it would be a good idea to add such features even in the unlikely event that you have tons of spare time. But if the interactivity requires a time commitment from your side, don't bite off more than you can chew. It is better to have a boring site than to have your first interaction with certain clients be a disappointment to them.
If your firm isn’t blogging, it needs to be. Blogs are to PR what email was to letters and desktop publishing was to the print industry. Blogging is public relations on steroids and a sugar high at the same time. And I mean that in a good way. And blogs are perfect for law firms.Well, not necessarily. Blogs can be a good way to get effective ownership of certain keywords in search engines - name a blog after your desired legal keyword or phrase, update regularly, and there's a good chance you'll do well under those keywords in search engine results. Blogs can also be sufficiently interesting or authoritative that they are read by a number of clients and potential clients on a regular basis, informing or reminding them of your expertise. But blogs are something of a "here today, gone tomorrow" form of publishing - archived pages on blogs tend to fall out of favor with search engines, even as the new content may continue to get good search engine results. Also there is no guarantee that, just because you blog about a legal subject and do it well, that your blog will be read or that it will garner return visits.
You may suspect that Pablo has prospered only because he's a sophisticated investor, but he simply put his money into one of the most popular mutual funds. He has more money in it than most Chileans because his salary is above average, but lower-paid workers who contributed to that fund for the same period of time would be in relatively good shape, too, because their projected pension would amount to more than 90 percent of their salaries.Okay... all well and good. But what if the stock market underperforms? Tierney explains that "But if you contribute for at least 20 years, Chile guarantees you a minimum pension that, relative to the median salary, is actually more generous than the median Social Security check."
By contrast, Social Security replaces less than 60 percent of your salary - and that's only if you were a low-income worker. Typical recipients get back less than half of their salaries.
New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof argued in favour of an implicit split in America, saying that the Democrats had "lost touch" with blue-collar voters who were once the backbone of the party.Today, in arguing for more depictions of interracial couples on TV, Kristof argues:
"One-third of Americans are evangelical Christians and many of them perceive Democrats as often contemptuous of their faith," Kristof wrote. "Frankly, they're often right."
Popular entertainment shapes our culture as well as reflects it, and one breakthrough might come late next year with the possible release of "Emma's War." That's a movie that 20th Century Fox is considering, in which a white woman - Nicole Kidman is being discussed - marries an African. It's great that Hollywood is close to catching up to Shakespeare's "Othello."Now, it's not that Kristof doesn't have a point that interracial relationships make TV and movie producers nervous. But isn't this an argument for Hollywood to finish a process of social transformation, and implicit within that argument that it is blue-collar America and the Bob Jones-type evangelicals who need to be brought into the 21st century? Does he really think those segments of society which still get hung up on interracial dating and marriage are going to have an epiphany after seeing a Nicole Kidman movie?
Let's hope that Hollywood will finally dare to be as iconoclastic as its audiences. It's been half a century since Brown v. Board of Education led to the integration of American schools, but the breakdown of the barriers of love will be a far more consequential and transformative kind of integration - not least because it's spontaneous and hormonal rather than imposed and legal.
Neither Anderson nor Timpone see any need for the paper to disclose in its pages that the chamber is an owner. Timpone said the chamber doesn't dictate the paper's news content and he defends the stories he runs as genuine news. He said he chose not to divulge the Record's connection to the chamber in print because "I was afraid we'd be prejudged. I thought, 'Let people judge us by our actions.'"Well, gee... You would think that with a $million dollar budget, they could have managed to draft a few original paragraphs for this page, rather than plagiarizing Jones Act material from my website.
We've got Justice Kennedy writing decisions based upon international law, not the Constitution of the United States? That's just outrageous," DeLay told Fox News Radio on Tuesday. "And not only that, but he said in session that he does his own research on the Internet? That is just incredibly outrageous."Sure... Absolutely outrageous....
"Our main finding was that rapid weight gain during the first week of life in this population of healthy, European-American, formula-fed infants was associated with being overweight two to three decades later," said lead author Nicolas Stettler, M.D., M.S.C.E., a pediatric nutrition specialist at The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia.How's this for an alternative hypothesis: Babies who gain weight more easily grow up to be adults who gain weight more easily. Or is that too obvious?
"It suggests that there may be a critical period in that first week during which the body's physiology may be programmed to develop chronic disease throughout life," Dr. Stettler added.
"Our findings also point toward new potential targets for preventing obesity," he said. "If these results are confirmed by other studies, they may lead to interventions in newborns to help prevent long-term development of obesity."
A man who robbed an Ann Arbor bank Friday afternoon lost most of the cash due to exploding dye packs, police said. ... A dye pack in the bag exploded before he could escape, staining the money and dispersing a tearing agent into the lobby.They found it all by themselves? Why do I feel like Rodney Dangerfield? ;-)
The man, who wore a plastic mask that covered his mouth and nose, along with clear goggles, then demanded access to the vault while pointing his gun at the manager's head, said Senior Special Agent Greg Stejskal of the Ann Arbor FBI office.
He fled with another bag of cash also containing a dye pack that activated in the parking lot. Witnesses said he then got into a waiting car described as a silver four-door sedan that was last seen heading south on Pittsfield Boulevard. ...
[Detective Sgt. Rich] Kinsey said contaminated cash was found by a resident several blocks south of the bank late Friday afternoon, and Pittsfield Township police officers located more contaminated bills in the Showcase Cinemas parking lot along Carpenter road.
"The Constitution is not a living organism," Scalia said.And, I'm quite sure, he would insist that anybody who disagrees is being highly illogical. It's too bad that there aren't any Star Trek shows presently being produced, because Scalia would be an interesting guest star - something of an odd cross between Spock and Bones.
Wal-Mart, an unlovable colossus, has more than 15,300 full- and part-time employees at its 52 stores in Maryland, many of them paid a good deal less than $10 an hour. Partly as a result of those modest wages, about half the workers opt out of a company health plan that requires them to contribute premiums and deductibles, reducing their take-home pay. When they get sick or hurt, the cost is borne by emergency rooms or by the state's taxpayers (including Wal-Mart's own unionized competitor, Giant Food Inc. ) in the form of Medicaid.And sure, if the Post were a blogger, it might be reasonable for it to stop there. But the Post is supposedly something more significant than a weblog, and thus it seems that it should have offered both a better analysis, and possibly even its thoughts on what might constitute the right solution.
